Border Town Girl

by John D. MacDonald

The guards at the Mexican end were checking cars as he walked by. They paid no attention to him. Barefooted women sat on the sidewalk, their backs against the wall, little piles of fruit and eggs in front of them. Christy felt weak. The blood soaked his right side at the waistline. A half-block from the public square on the opposite side from the bridge he saw the sign. He climbed the dark stairway. There was one man in the waiting room. The nurse was a cute little thing in starched white. She spoke to him in rapid Spanish.

  Christy sighed and took the revolver out. The waiting patient’s eyes widened and he crossed himself. The nurse gave a little cry of fear. He motioned them both toward the other door. The nurse opened it and backed in. The man slipped around her. The doctor looked up with sharp annoyance from the boy whose infected leg he was treating. His eyes narrowed as he saw the gun but the expression of annoyance remained on his slim olive face.

  “What do you want?” the doctor snapped.

  “I’m shot. I want help.”

  “Put the gun away.”

  “Nuts. Tell the kid and the man and your nurse to go over into that corner and face the wall and keep their mouths shut. Hurry it up.”

  The doctor spoke to the three. They meekly did as they were told. Christy put the gun in his left hand, shrugged his right arm out of the coat. He unbuttoned his shirt, pulled the cloth away from the wound and got his right arm out of the sleeve. Then he transferred the gun to his right hand and got his left arm out of the coat and shirt. He dropped them to the floor. The doctor watched him calmly.

  Christy said, “Now fix me up, Doc. That’s a pretty little nurse. You try anything funny with me and I shoot her right in the small of the back.”

  “You are a stupid man, señor. I can work easier if you sit down. There.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “No. It tore the muscle very little. Hit no bone. Hold still.”

  Antiseptic burned through the wound. Christy sucked in his breath sharply. The doctor applied folded bandages to the entrance wound and the exit wound and bound them tightly in place with gauze, wrapping it over the shoulder, under the armpit and around the great chest. He anchored the bandages more securely in place with wide strips of adhesive.

  “Done,” the doctor said.

  “Now have the girl wash out my shirt in that sink over there and wring it as dry as she can get it.” He took the money from the shirt pocket and threw the garment toward the girl. She did as she was directed. The doctor spoke to the boy and he came timidly over. The doctor began to finish his work on the infected leg while the boy watched the gun with wide eyes.

  Christy put the damp white shirt on, then the coat. The doctor looked up. “That will be twenty American dollars, señor.”

  Christy laughed. “You make good jokes.”

  The doctor turned white around the mouth. “That is my profession and I get paid for my profession, señor. Pay me or I shall go to that window and call to the police.” The dark eyes looked at Christy with contempt, without fear.

  “Are you completely nuts?”

  The doctor turned his back on the gun and walked steadily to the window.

  “All right, all right,” Christy shouted. He threw two tens on the floor. The doctor spoke to the nurse. She picked them up and handed them to him.

  “Do you want a receipt, señor?” the doctor asked, amusement in his eyes.

  “No,” Christy said thickly. He hurried out. In the waiting room he turned and called back, “None of you leave here for a half hour.”

  The doctor and the nurse turned and stared at him as though he had already been forgotten. The nurse handed the doctor a roll of adhesive tape and he once again bent over the infected leg.

  Halfway down the stairway, Christy stopped and tried to plan the next move. It would be wise to wait until midnight. In some bar he could find a tourist. The tourist would have a car. A car would get him to Vera Cruz or Tampico. Somehow he would get on a ship. He wondered if he’d killed the ranger. The man had slumped with his head at a funny angle. Soon they’d check up and find he’d crossed the bridge. They’d be looking for him. The Piedras Chicas police would be looking. They’d have his description.

  He turned down another side street. It was empty. He found a barred wooden door set into a cement wall. He got his thick fingers around the edge of it, braced his feet and wrenched it open, hearing the squeal as the nails tore free. He went inside and pushed the door shut. He was in a quiet garden patio. He stood and listened. He fitted the nails back into the holes, wrapped a handkerchief around his knuckles and drove them in. Again he listened. A small fountain tinkled in the middle of the patio. Christy crawled back into a place where the shrubbery was dense. He lay down with his back against the wall. The torn shoulder throbbed.

  After an hour had passed a stocky blonde woman with a ravaged face came out to the flagstones near the fountain. Christy watched her from the shadows. She spread a blanket, went back toward the house, and returned a few minutes later with a tall bottle and a tiny glass. She slipped out of her housecoat and lay face down under the brute sun.

  9

  IT WAS BLUE DUSK WHEN HE AWOKE. HE SAT up with a start, feeling for the keys in his pocket as he turned, feeling the keys at the same instant he saw the car, as he saw Diana sleeping beside him. He exhaled slowly. There was a tang of burning cedar scrub in the air and he heard the distant tank-tankle of goat bells.

  Sleep had ironed out the torment in her face, so that she looked almost childlike. She lay on her left side, facing him, both hands with the palms together under her cheek. A thick rope of blonde hair lay forward across her throat. Her knees were bent and thrust forward toward him. The line of her waist dipped sharply inward and then mounted high over the round crest of hip. He lit a cigarette and watched her in the gathering darkness as he smoked, thinking that few things in the world are more beautiful than the line of hip and flank of a sleeping woman.

  His watched had stopped at four. The car clock would still be operating. Soon it would be time to turn back to town. He wondered if he had made a mistake in not insisting that they turn back as soon as she had agreed that it was the thing to do. But if they had been picked up on the road, it might have appeared that they were doubling back, still in flight. Darkness would give them a good chance to reach the hotel without being stopped.

  He wondered if Diana could go free by giving evidence. He hoped so.

  She began to make small crying sounds in her sleep. Her shoulder twitched. He butted his cigarette against the trunk of the tree and kissed her on the lips. She awoke with a start and a frightened cry.

  “Oh, Lane!” she said. “I was frightened. I was running and running and the ground was going by under my feet, carrying me backward no matter how hard I ran. And Christy was standing and grinning and waiting for me.”

  “We’ve got to go, kitten.”

  She stood up and smoothed her dress down with the palms of her hands. “Gee, I’m messy,” she said.

  “Still think I’m wrong to take you back?”

  He stood beside her. She smiled up into his face. “You gave me a chance to make that decision. I watched you while you slept. There was the car and I knew the keys were in your pocket. There was even a rock. See it over there? As big as a baseball. If I hadn’t decided you were right, you’d have a terrible headache by now, Lane.”

  “A little too trusting of me to go to sleep, wasn’t it?”

  “Maybe that’s why I couldn’t hit you.”

  He looked through the night toward the west and sighed. “I guess we better go get this over with.”

  She stood close to him, wrapped her thin fingers around his wrist. Her fingers were cold. “I watched you while you were sleeping,” she said in a half-whisper. “It should have been you, Lane. Somebody like you. Right from the start. I kept pretending that was the way it was.”

  She seemed so forlorn and small and lost. He put his arm around her. She put her face against his shoulder, blonde hair touching the side of his ja
w. She lifted her mouth and he kissed her.

  Without his knowing precisely how it happened, they were both down on the dark ground again. Her breath was like a quick furnace, her mouth like broken flowers, her body flexing, adjusting itself to him, eagerly awaiting and accepting him. Suddenly he remembered the daughter of many kings, and the silver-blots of moonlight on her. And remembered back further, back to the slender ease of Sandy, and the long Sunday mornings.

  He forced himself away from the girl. He stood up.

  “It’s no good,” she said in a clear, bitter voice. “No damn good. Too many others. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “No. That isn’t it.”

  She began to weep helplessly. He helped her up. They got into the car. He started it, turned the lights on, headed west. The sound of weeping ceased after a time.

  Finally she said, in a clear, questioning tone, “You know something? I’m going back into trouble. But I feel good, Lane. I feel excited, as though I were going to my first dance. Why is that?”

  “Relief, maybe. You’ve been afraid and you’ve felt guilty. Now the decision is made and you aren’t afraid any more.”

  “Is it that simple?”

  “Why not?”

  “Maybe part of it is you, Lane.”

  He frowned at her in the dimness of the dash light. “How so?”

  She was looking straight at the road. “Maybe I love you.”

  “You don’t. You shouldn’t. It can’t work.”

  “Sandy?”

  “I guess so. One-woman man.”

  “I guessed that might be what it was that… stopped you. Back there. But, oh, Lane, let’s be gay for now. Let’s pretend we’re going to a dance or something.”

  “With a good band. And refreshments in a tent.”

  “No square dances, though.”

  “If they have any, we’ll sit them out.”

  She moved close and leaned her head on his shoulder. She sang all the rest of the way. The old, good songs. Her voice was small, husky and true. He had the feeling that she was singing not to him but to the past and that this was, for her, a sort of farewell. Then there were the lights of Baker ahead, the neon on the tourist courts, the cars flanked outside the drive-ins, the floodlights on the river bridge. As soon as they were in the town she moved away from him, sat huddled and silent.

  He parked a hundred feet beyond the hotel entrance. The space was short and it took him a long time to work the car in next to the curb. “You stay right here,” he said. “Let me handle it.” He had by habit taken the keys from the ignition. He saw her looking at him. Beyond her he could see through the open door of a drugstore. It all looked so completely sane and ordinary that for the passing of several seconds he had the feeling that all this was a masquerade of some sort, that there was no truth in what Diana had told him, that it was a cleverly planned fantasy and any moment now a group of friends from the old days would leap from the shadows, laughing, confessing, explaining.

  He threw the keys over into her lap, got out and chunked the door shut. He walked with long strides to the hotel entrance and, with his head high, he went in, wearing what he fervently hoped was a confident and optimistic smile.

  At dusk the chunky blonde woman stood up and pulled on her housecoat. During the long afternoon she had repeatedly filled the small glass and drank. Christy was tortured with thirst. And there was a new fear in him. His shoulder felt hot and swollen now and the pulsing was worse. He had felt the heat creep up from the base of his neck, flushing his right cheek, extending the throb to his heavy jawbone and his right ear. It was hard to remember just where he was and why he was hiding. He would remember perfectly, and then there would be a funny aching twist in his head and he would be back in the carny days. He’d missed the afternoon performance. Big Mike would be sore. He had to get out of here and get back to the lot.

  He lay and listened to his heart booming. A heavy, frightening beat. Thrum, thrum, thrum. Then there would be a subtle change of rhythm. Ta-thum, ta-thum, ta-thum.

  His mind dipped and sped back to here and now. The carny was years ago. Why had George sent him here? No, it wasn’t George. The cops had George. Unless that guy was bluffing, they had him good. Nailed. Along with the rest of the mob. That bitch Diana had been the cause of this. He created her image in his mind, the sneering mouth and the contemptuous eyes. Figured she was too good for Christy, did she? He’d show her. He’d do a good job of showing her. He grinned as he remembered how she’d fallen when he’d hit her. He’d waited a long, long time for Diana. Patient waiting. And there she was, just thirty feet away. The great ropy fibrous muscles tightened and his breath came short and fast.

  Then Diana turned and he saw that it was the other woman, the one who had lain under the whip of the afternoon sun.

  He held his breath as she started directly toward him. She walked uncertainly. She had filled the empty bottle in the fountain and she paused to pick flowers and shove them clumsily into the neck of the bottle. She talked to herself.

  Christy tried to make himself smaller. Now she stood close to him, so close that he could have reached out under the bush and touched her bare foot. It was a soiled bare foot.

  When she gasped and jumped back, Christy lunged up through the brush, clamped his hand on her throat and pulled her back down to the dark place where he had been hiding. She fell like a fat sawdust doll.

  He whispered, “Now when I leggo your throat, I don’t want no screaming.”

  He took his hand away. Even in the dusk and the shadows he could see that her throat had a funny smashed look. Her face was slowly blackening, the eyes protruding, the swelling tongue growing between the lips.

  One hand slapped the ground weakly and her bare heels hammered the dark damp soil at the base of a bush. She lay still. It took him quite a while to realize that she was dead. Something funny had happened to her throat.

  “Diana!” he said. He shook her. “Diana!”

  But it wasn’t Diana, of course. He rolled his big head from side to side like a wounded bear. He crouched over her until it was full night. Then he crawled over her. As his knee with his weight on it came down on her she made a gobbling sound in her throat.

  “Shut up, you,” he said. He crawled on his hands and knees to the fountain. He lay on his face and put his mouth into the water and drank deeply, as an animal drinks. Then he stood up. His right shoulder was a great pulsating fire. The fingers of his right hand felt swollen and stiff.

  “Infection,” he said aloud. He frowned and tried to puzzle it out. Then, like a blow across the mouth, came the vision of the suppurating leg of the boy the doctor had been working on.

  “Didn’t wash his hands,” Christy mumbled. “Didn’t wash his damn dirty hands. Did it on purpose.”

  He went to the gate and broke it open again. As he pulled it shut behind him, he had another one of those moments when he couldn’t remember what city this was, what year it was, where he was supposed to go. He leaned against the wall and let the warm breeze blow against his face. He shuddered.

  Then he remembered that he had to get a car. He went toward the zocolo in a lurching, ungainly walk. The zocolo was brightly lighted. He pulled back into the shadows as he saw the policeman standing sixty feet away.

  A small boy tugged at his pants leg. “Geeve me money, meester. Geeve me money, meester.”

  Christy slapped at him and missed. The child danced off into the darkness, screaming at him in Spanish. The policeman turned and looked toward the mouth of the dark street.

  Christy turned and ran heavily back down the street. The breath whistled in his throat, his mouth was open as he strained for air. The child danced along behind him, chanting, “Geeve me money, geeve money, geeve money.”

  After two blocks the street was no longer paved. He could see the flame flicker inside the open shacks of the poor. Other children had joined the first one. They followed him, making a game of it, making a song of it. Then there was no street and dogs snapped at
his heels. He tripped, fell, rolled among the filth and excited yammerings of chickens. People watched him from the doorways.

  The group of dogs and children grew. This was as much fun as a fiesta. Look at the big burro! Down he goes again! Now up again and running. Come on, amigos! Faster! Geeve money, Joe. Hey, Joe! Geeve money. Ai, he’s down again, this time among the puercos of the Señora Cordoba y Martinez. Run, amigos. Ai, hear the screams of the señora! He runs for the rio.

  Each breath Christy took was a sob. His side was one vast pain and his legs were leaden. Suddenly there was a steep pitch of bank. He saw the evil shine of the water and, too late, tried to stop. He rolled heavily, helplessly down the bank and into the water. It was inches deep. He stood up, dripping wet, and saw the line of screaming, pointing children at the crest of the bank, outlined against the last thin light of the night sky. Dogs leaned over the edge of the bank and barked boldly.

  The shock of the water had cleared his head. Christy looked downriver and saw the lighted bridge. He turned and plodded out into the river. The yells of the children grew fainter. The water came up to his knees. Walking became more difficult. Then it was midway up his thighs. The river seemed impossibly wide. It reached his waist, and for the first time he felt the gentle tug of the current.

  Ahead, suspended in the air, a blue neon sign high over the town clicked on, brilliant against the blackness. The Sage House.

  With his eyes fixed on the sign, he moved steadily forward.

  Tomkinton sat behind the desk of the hotel manager. Lane Sanson sat in a chair planted squarely in front of the desk. A ranger stood behind Lane’s chair.

  “Look,” said Lane, “I just want to—”

  “Please shut up,” Tomkinton said emotionlessly. “You’ve told your story. We’ve made arrangements to have your ‘character’ witness brought over, if they can find her. In the meantime there’s nothing you can say.”

  “You can’t treat me like a criminal.”

  Tomkinton smiled without humor. “We’re not, so far. We’re treating you like what you are. A fool. You’re one of those people who think they can apply their own set of special moral standards to the world. Last night a man was killed in this town. This morning a ranger was killed and my co-worker badly injured. We’re in no mood to play patty-cakes with the likes of you, Sanson. You’re just a damn dilettante with so little sense you got mixed up in this mess.”